Talks

Wireless Communication amazed the world at the turn of the century. That astounding early technology has morphed into one of the hottest communications devices on the market today. Technology historian Robert Friedel and Mike Lazaridis, inventor of the BlackBerry, bring you the story of wireless communication.

In 1905, Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen completed the first ever transit of the fabled Northwest Passage, culminating a centuries long quest that had claimed ships and lives. Amundsen\'s feat was one of many human achievements in the first decade of the new century, and a landmark in the history exploration. Amundsen\'s voyage was preceded by the controversial North Pole expedition of Robert Peary, another long sought prize of explorers. Amundsen\'s quests shifted south to Antarctica and the South Pole, a prize he achieved, and then back to the Arctic, when he tried and failed to navigate, locked in the polar ice, to the North Pole. This presentation will examine the life, feats, trials, failures and successes of Amundsen. James P.Delgado, Roald Amundsen, northwest passage, north pole, south pole, exploration, Arctic, Frobisher, Peary, Franklin, Clark, Ross, Mclure,

Albert Einstein worked in the Swiss Patent Office in 1905. What was the new world of technology that a patent examiner would have confronted in the young century? Robert Friedel, historian of technology and author of several books on inventions of this period shows why this period a century ago was as exciting and disorienting an age of technological change as our own--maybe even more so! The horseless carriage (we would call it the automobile), the wireless telegraph, motion pictures, electric light and power, as well as a host of surprising new minor inventions, all filled the young twentieth century with an air of novelty and expectation.

How has the most celebrated scientific theory of the 20th century held up under the exacting scrutiny of planetary probes, radio telescopes and atomic clocks? After 100 years, was Einstein right? Clifford Will, Einstein, general relativity, spacetime, gravity wave, mercury perihelion, light, radioastronomy, gravititational lenses, quasars, pulsar

The problem of vacuum energy is reviewed. The observational evidence in favor of a non-zero cosmological constant is described. I then discuss several possible explanations for how a theoretically natural huge value of vacuum energy could be adjusted down to the unnaturally tiny but observed value.

At the turn of the century, numerous figures were attempting to form a new unitary science of psychology, modelled on how they imagined sciences like physics and chemistry functioned, with the discovery of universal laws and discoverers who would be proclaimed to be on the scale of Copernicus and Newton. It was intended that the formation of this new science would be nothing less than the completion of the scientific revolution, and that as a consequence, it would transform psychiatry, psychotherapy, the human sciences and indeed, all walks of life. Already by 1905, this dream was receding in an endless proliferation of competing and incompatible practices and conceptions - and one which has not ceased till this day. This talk reconstructs some of the multiple intersecting trajectories in one year of this would be science. Sonu Shamdansani, unitary science, psychology, psychoanalysis, mind and body, consciousness, 20th century, experimental, pathological, psychiatry, history

Few, if any, papers have attracted as much attention as Einstein’s June paper on the Special Theory of Relativity and no equation of physics has become part of common discourse except for the equation Einstein presented in his September paper: E = mc2. The concepts of space and time are ubiquitous in physics and, since the Special Theory of Relativity fundamentally altered these concepts, the impact of the June paper on physics has been pervasive. With the additional assertion, made in the June paper, that the speed of light is a constant for all observers, time and space became relative. From his Theory of Relativity, Einstein produced his September surprise: ponderable mass and incorporeal energy are equivalent. Humans distinguish between mass and energy, but Nature does not. John S Rigden, Einstein, special relativity, space, time, general relativity, energy, mass, speed of light,